It's a well-known fact (channeling my best Cliff Clavin) that bacon makes everything better. So when Joy the Baker posted her recipe for Brown Sugar Bacon Waffles a few months ago, everything inside me said, "Mmmmm . . . bacon."
But you just can't enjoy this kind of bacony goodness by yourself. It has to be shared, mostly because you need someone to call 911 if you lapse into a bacon coma. So last week while on vacation with my cousin John and his family, out came the recipe.
First off, caramelizing the brown sugar on the bacon was messy, but only in that the pan was a P.I.T.A. to clean. Imagine candied bacon, and that's basically what it is. Thankfully, Joy the Baker recommended letting the bacon cool before chopping it, because even chilled, it's sticky as all get out; I can only imagine how hard it is to handle warm.
The wet and dry ingredients are fairly straightforward, and the chopped bacon pieces are just folded into the combined ingredients. The trick, though, is to stir the batter gently each time a scoop is placed on the waffle iron, because the bacon tended to sink to the bottom of the batter.
The final product, at least to me, tended to be a bit dry, but perhaps that's because I've been spoiled by John's third-generation butter waffles (with major props to Aunty Lou and Grandma's recipe that he follows). And as any good German-descended family knows, butter goes on any- and everything, so some condiments moistened the waffles up considerably.
It almost became a treasure hunt for us as we ate, looking for the hidden nuggets of sweet bacon goodness nestled in the fluffy recesses of waffle. And every so often, one of us would mutter through a mouthful of waffle, "Ohhh . . . that was a good one."
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